Raiders of the Lost Desk

Today the bank appraiser comes to look at the house. Another step towards Chicago. In the meantime I've started the packing up of our home, starting with my office. My grandparents lived in two homes that I remember. One in Chicago for probably thirty plus years, and then the "new" house in Tinley Park that they lived in for another twenty years or so. Etched into my mind is the stuff that they had. Lots and lots of stuff that had no value of any kind jammed into the basement of the Tinley Park house. On the day they moved my grandfather out of that house, a dumpster was deposited on the front lawn. I am so jealous of that. It would make moving so much easier.

So for the last four days I have been going through all my crap, digging down through drawers and filing cabinets. For the first few days there was a constant grinding of the paper shredder as I went through a couple of decades of documents. I had to be sure that everything that had my Social Security number and other sensitive information on them was destroyed. Further into the depths of my office drawers I started finding half finished projects. I found a book I tried to write in 1978. It was all hand scrawled musings about my life in California that I had put down in a black composition book. It actually made me blush with embarrassment when I read it, it was so bad. Into the shredder it went.

In one drawer I found the history of my personal computers, going all the way back to my first one in 1994, a Packard Bell with the original windows on it. For some reason I kept every technical manual for that computer, every bit of software that had been included, and the warrantees. Back when I bought that computer it was the greatest. I was able to go online with AOL and talk to other people in chat rooms. I also found that if I looked hard enough I could find photos of naked men on the AOL site. Sure, they had all the genitals blurred out, but they were free and they were kind of naked. Best of all, my Packard Bell computer came with a full complement of games including solitaire, freecell, and spider. The next year I bought the new Windows 95 and discovered something called 'The Internet'.

I have to stop these little bouts of nostalgia or I'll never get this job done. Tomorrow is bulk garbage day and all that old computer crap is going out there on the curb along with a whole bunch of other stuff that we don't need to move. Things that I hope Mark won't miss for a long time. At least not until the garbage truck is out of sight.